ia never paused from her career to inquire further
of her victims; she never entered into communication with either. They
knew not her address nor her fate, nor she theirs. As she had reckoned,
Mainwaring made no effort to recover himself from his fall. All the
high objects that had lured his ambition were gone from him evermore.
No place in the State, no authority in the senate, awaits in England the
man with a blighted name. For the lesser objects of life he had no heart
and no care. They lived in obscurity in a small village in Cornwall till
the Peace allowed them to remove to France; the rest of their fate is
known.

Meanwhile, Lucretia removed to one of those smaller Londons, resorts
of pleasure and idleness, with which rich England abounds, and in which
widows of limited income can make poverty seem less plebeian. And now,
to all those passions that had hitherto raged within her, a dismal
apathy succeeded. It was the great calm in her sea of life. The winds
fell, and the sails drooped. Her vengeance satisfied, that which she had
made so preternaturally the main object of existence, once fulfilled,
left her in youth objectless.

She strove at first to take pleasure in the society of the place; but
its frivolities and pettiness of purpose soon wearied that masculine
and grasping mind, already made insensible to the often healthful, often
innocent, excitement of trifles, by the terrible ordeal it had passed.
Can the touch of the hand, scorched by the burning iron, feel pleasure
in the softness of silk, or the light down of the cygnet's plume? She
next sought such relief as study could afford; and her natural bent of
thought, and her desire to vindicate her deeds to herself, plunged
her into the fathomless abyss of metaphysical inquiry with the hope
to confirm into positive assurance her earlier scepticism,--with the
atheist's hope to annihilate the soul, and banish the presiding God.
But no voice that could satisfy her reason came from those dreary deeps;
contradiction on contradiction met her in the maze. Only when, wearied
with book-lore, she turned her eyes to the visible Nature, and beheld
everywhere harmony, order, system, contrivance, art, did she start with
the amaze and awe of instinctive conviction, and the natural religion
revolted from her cheerless ethics. Then came one of those sudden
reactions common with strong passions and exploring minds, but more
common with women, however manlike, than with men. H